Speaking at a Goldman Sachs technology conference today, Microsoft’s Tami Reller casually revealed sales numbers for Windows 8 licenses. The last time Microsoft announced sales was in May 2013, when the company had sold more than 100 million licenses.

A spokesperson for the company elaborated on license sales to Pocket-lint with the following statement: “Windows 8 has surpassed 200 million licenses sold, and we continue to see momentum. This number includes Windows licenses that ship on a new tablet or PC, as well as upgrades to Windows 8. The figure does not include volume license sales to enterprise."

Windows 8 is a part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It released to manufacturing on in 2012, but it didn't become available to the general public until October 2012. It's worth noting that Windows 7, the predecessor to Windows 8, hit 240 million licenses sold after one year. Windows 8 is therefore growing at a slower rate.

Reller attributed the slow growth to a general lull in the PC market. The company executive also said Microsoft is being very thoughtful about "what’s going well, what’s not going well" when it comes to Windows 8, and it's considering options on how to improve things.

Reller didn't detail any changes expected to come in Windows 8.1 Update 1, though the company apparently wants Windows 8 to run on smaller devices. This echoes earlier reports that claimed Update 1 might optimise memory and disk space requirements, allowing Windows 8.1 to run on lower-end and smaller tablets.

Microsoft is developing a Windows 8.1 update called Update 1. It is thought to release on 8 April, shortly after Microsoft's Build developer conference that kicks off on 2 April.